Henry Ford and Charismatic Leadership
Henry Ford was born in 1863 to parents shaped by the recent immigration experience: his mother, Mary, was born in a Belgian family and raised by an Irish immigrant family, while his father, William, immigrated with his family from Ireland at the age of 21, after being evicted from their farm by their English landlord. The Protestant Fords did not settle in the eastern cities with the Catholic Irish but continued moving west, driven by the promise of land ownership in Michigan (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, pp. 16-17). In William's mind, the ability to own the land one worked was America's greatest virtue, setting it apart from Ireland (Halberstam, 1986, p. 51).
Try as he might, William could never impress this salient virtue on his oldest son, Henry. Henry detested farming, remarking that "(c)onsidering the results there is altogether too much work" (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, P. 21). He much preferred the study and repair of all things mechanical, an activity praised by his mother but scorned by his father if it did not involve farm machinery. This disagreement intensified when Mary Ford died in childbirth, an event Henry blamed on his father; their subsequent relationship alternated between conflict and truce until William's death in 1903 (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, p.22).
One morning, when Henry was 17, he set off for school with his younger brothers; rather than make the turn off for school, however, he continued walking along the road to Detroit (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, p.24). Working in machine shops, he acquired knowledge about many types of machines; he eventually went to work for Detroit Edison, becoming the chief mechanic within one year. Experimenting with gasoline powered automobiles starting in 1893, he drove his first automobile around Detroit on June 4, 1896 (Collier and Horowitz, 1987, P.9). After two unsuccessful tries at manufacturing autos (both companies dissolving ...